How to beautify cURL output in the terminal using jq
In this post, we will beautify the output of the cURL using jq. In this way, we can get more readable responses from the cURL and test our APIs easily.
Firstly, let’s make a simple API request to the Finage’s currency API using cURL.
curl "https://api.finage.co.uk/last?currencies=GBPUSD,EURUSD&apikey=YOUR_API_KEY"
This command will return an output given below.
As you can see, it’s hard to read. It’s a basic API call. Finage has more than 700+ symbols. This response could be more complicated. Let’s beautify it with jq.
Install jq
Install jq for MacOS
brew install jq
Install jq for Linux
sudo apt-get install jq
You can check jq’s page for more installation instructions for other platforms.
https://stedolan.github.io/jq/download/
Beautify & Parse with jq
Now, let’s change the request that we made using jq;
curl "https://api.finage.co.uk/last?currencies=GBPUSD,EURUSD&apikey=YOUR_API_KEY" | jq '.'
This will return a response like this,
It’s more readable and easy to parse now. You can pick any property of the JSON response object like;
curl "https://api.finage.co.uk/last?currencies=GBPUSD,EURUSD&apikey=YOUR_API_KEY" | jq '.lastUpdate'
It will return
"2020-08-06T20:52:34"
Also, we can get only the property names or values from the response. Check the command below,
curl "https://api.finage.co.uk/last?currencies=GBPUSD,EURUSD&apikey=YOUR_API_KEY" | jq '.currencies[].name'
With jq, you can test your APIs easily and make it readable. For more information about the jq, please visit the jq Manual.
You can check all available symbols in the Finage’s documentation.